If you deliver more than a few emails to the outside world, especially if a good portion of those go to Yahoo, you may want to read this message:
http://marc.info/?l=postfix-users&m=127689518629249&w=2
Actually, read the whole thread, it's interesting and the discussion still continues:
http://marc.info/?t=127619611600001&r=1&w=2
TLDR: The 2.3.3 Postfix version that comes with RH / CentOS 5 doesn't do delivery rate control very well and has a habit of annoying some email providers. A simple upgrade from 2.3.3 to 2.7.0, no config changes, can improve delivery rate by 50% in some cases (e.g. if you deliver thousands of emails to Yahoo). With config changes, the improvement might be even bigger.
Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 02:28:36PM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.
To be fair, RH/CentOS also ships with Sendmail-8.13.8, also from August 2006. What a golden month for mail daemons that was.
The door's wide open for someone with the energy to put together a server distro based on CentOS but with modern versions of essential daemons. Yes, it wouldn't inherit certification from commercial software vendors who now spec RH/CentOS. But major daemons like Postfix and Sendmail are very well tested in tens of thousands of deployments in versions not over a year old (which are significantly superior to versions from 2006, no matter how much backporting of new features RH might have done meanwhile). They should be stock in any current distro.
It used to be that RH's advantage was its daemons weren't as crufty as Debian stable. But now with Ubuntu's server version solid - not nearly as well supported by the user community as CentOS, but quite current in its major daemon versions - those who want there to be good, widely used distros in the RH mold five years out from now would do well to push ahead of RH in the server space. Some sort of a CentOS+, unbound from RH's laggard ways, but conservative in its stability, could find itself quite welcome in the world.
Is anyone working on this? (No, not Fedora. That's not a server OS.)
Whit
On 06/18/2010 03:02 PM, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
To be fair, RH/CentOS also ships with Sendmail-8.13.8, also from August 2006. What a golden month for mail daemons that was.
lol
The door's wide open for someone with the energy to put together a server distro based on CentOS but with modern versions of essential daemons.
Nah. That's like killing a flea with the jackhammer. You don't often need *all* daemons to be up-to-date on any given system - and when you do, that's usually a tiny machine, like my personal mail/web server, in which case you can deal with the upgrades on a case-by-case basis.
Just "rpm -U" the 2.7 package and that's it. For a mail relay, the rest is good.
Whit Blauvelt wrote:
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 02:28:36PM -0700, Florin Andrei wrote:
Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.
To be fair, RH/CentOS also ships with Sendmail-8.13.8, also from August 2006. What a golden month for mail daemons that was.
and in fact, EL5's beta started in September 2006, it was released in early 2007. We're overdue for a major new release, I think.
... It used to be that RH's advantage was its daemons weren't as crufty as Debian stable. But now with Ubuntu's server version solid - not nearly as well supported by the user community as CentOS, but quite current in its major daemon versions - those who want there to be good, widely used distros in the RH mold five years out from now would do well to push ahead of RH in the server space. Some sort of a CentOS+, unbound from RH's laggard ways, but conservative in its stability, could find itself quite welcome in the world.
Is anyone working on this? (No, not Fedora. That's not a server OS.)
isn't EL6 coming out soon ? beta 1 released in April, if they follow the same schedule as EL5, beta 2 is should be along pretty soon, and release would likely follow about 4 months later, which I'd estimate to be in the October time frame...
(reading the EL6 beta 1 release notes) EL6 will be based on 2.6.32, use EXT4 by default, have XFS support (in 64bit builds), Apache 2.2.14, gcc 4.4, samba 3.0, postgres 8.4, mysql 5.1. LVM now supports mirrors, so you can dodge the added complexities of using mdraid under lvm.
On 06/18/2010 03:19 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
(reading the EL6 beta 1 release notes) EL6 will be based on 2.6.32, use EXT4 by default, have XFS support (in 64bit builds), Apache 2.2.14, gcc 4.4, samba 3.0, postgres 8.4, mysql 5.1
and Postfix 2.6.5. Not bad. I could live with that.
On Fri, 18 Jun 2010, Florin Andrei wrote:
On 06/18/2010 03:19 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
(reading the EL6 beta 1 release notes) EL6 will be based on 2.6.32, use EXT4 by default, have XFS support (in 64bit builds), Apache 2.2.14, gcc 4.4, samba 3.0, postgres 8.4, mysql 5.1
and Postfix 2.6.5. Not bad. I could live with that.
In my one and only RHEL 6b1 installation, Postfix was the default MTA. I suspect that will be true with the final release as well, though sendmail 8.14.3 is also available.
On 18/06/2010 23:19, John R Pierce wrote:
isn't EL6 coming out soon ? beta 1 released in April,
afait ETA on el6 is august'ish this year. but C4 and C5 are still maintained and in mass production *now*. If there is a clearcut problem definition as this postfix issue is, then creating ( facilitating ? ) a solution should be worth considering as well. Should it not ?
- KB
On 6/18/2010 5:02 PM, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.
To be fair, RH/CentOS also ships with Sendmail-8.13.8, also from August 2006. What a golden month for mail daemons that was.
The door's wide open for someone with the energy to put together a server distro based on CentOS but with modern versions of essential daemons. Yes, it wouldn't inherit certification from commercial software vendors who now spec RH/CentOS. But major daemons like Postfix and Sendmail are very well tested in tens of thousands of deployments in versions not over a year old (which are significantly superior to versions from 2006, no matter how much backporting of new features RH might have done meanwhile). They should be stock in any current distro.
It used to be that RH's advantage was its daemons weren't as crufty as Debian stable. But now with Ubuntu's server version solid - not nearly as well supported by the user community as CentOS, but quite current in its major daemon versions - those who want there to be good, widely used distros in the RH mold five years out from now would do well to push ahead of RH in the server space. Some sort of a CentOS+, unbound from RH's laggard ways, but conservative in its stability, could find itself quite welcome in the world.
Is anyone working on this? (No, not Fedora. That's not a server OS.)
I agree with the sentiment of wanting something with a well-tested kernel and base lib set and fairly current apps, but you do know that RHEL6 beta is out now don't you? It has been a while but you wouldn't have wanted anything based on the intermediate Fedora versions. So it's probably not the time to start thinking about building something else. And the LTS versions of Ubuntu would probably be the place to jump if you are looking for current alternatives.
On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 06:02:10PM -0400, Whit Blauvelt wrote:
The door's wide open for someone with the energy to put together a server distro based on CentOS but with modern versions of essential daemons. Yes,
Or wait for RedHat^WCentOS 6, which can't be too far out...
RHEL 2.1: Mar 2002 (AS), May 2003 (ES) RHEL 3: Oct 2003 RHEL 4: Feb 2005 RHEL 5: Mar 2007 RHEL 6: ??? (previous Beta's have been 5-6 months...)
Funky; in June 2006 RHEL claimed they would slow their release schedule to every 2 years (rather than 18 months). Oops! They didn't make that :-)
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9000903/Red_Hat_slows_down_release_sc...
Stephen Harris wrote:
RHEL 2.1: Mar 2002 (AS), May 2003 (ES) RHEL 3: Oct 2003 RHEL 4: Feb 2005 RHEL 5: Mar 2007 RHEL 6: ??? (previous Beta's have been 5-6 months...)
Funky; in June 2006 RHEL claimed they would slow their release schedule to every 2 years (rather than 18 months). Oops! They didn't make that :-)
I bet they realized that even 2 years, with a 7 year life cycle, they'd be supporting 3-4 major versions concurrently.
Is anyone working on this? (No, not Fedora. That's not a server OS.)
When i find some package "old" i just get the SRPM from Fedora and i try to compile it in CentOS (it's very fun!)
although CentOS/RHEL packages seems to be old, RH folks back-port security / bugfix patches
I use fedora in my laptop it almost very stable, for no critical server fedora is good also if yum preupgrade will be well supported then fedora for server will be better (you have 1y of update before preupgrade)
Best regards.
On 18/06/2010 22:28, Florin Andrei wrote:
Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.
While you are doing that - also think about this : Red Hat have a policy, and they stick with it. Its something that works well for them, the ISVs around the base and its something that works for us. We have a policy too, but our policy is split into 2 segments.
1) Stick as close to upstream as possible for the main distro.
2) Its about the users and use cases. Which is unlike Red Hat's cause - where its about a supportable base, with some level of assurance passing through to the users about what level of support they can get when they call a phone number. You dont get that with CentOS - but what you do get is something like this :
- Step up and offer to maintain ( which would mean taking responsibility for ) a newer postfix package in CentOSPlus for CentOS-4 and 5 ( Not sure if 3 is worth doing now ). And there will be @centos.org people who would gladly help you along the process and facilitate it.
- KB
On 06/18/2010 05:49 PM, Karanbir Singh wrote:
On 18/06/2010 22:28, Florin Andrei wrote:
Fun fact: Postfix-2.3.3 has been released in August 2006. Think about that.
While you are doing that - also think about this : Red Hat have a policy, and they stick with it. Its something that works well for them, the ISVs around the base and its something that works for us.
No, that's fine, really. I was just pointing out that, for some Internet-facing systems, this policy may be inadequate, due to the fast-changing nature of the Internet.
For DB servers and other systems deeply buried into the datacenter, the policy is fine.
Florin Andrei wrote on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:42:46 -0700:
No, that's fine, really. I was just pointing out that, for some Internet-facing systems, this policy may be inadequate, due to the fast-changing nature of the Internet.
I disagree. The included Postfix works just fine. You have a very specific need that 99.??? % of the users don't have. This doesn't rectify such a major version jump. You can always install a newer version that has the features you need by yourself - as you did. Thanks for the link to the thread, though, interesting read.
Kai
On 22/06/2010 11:31, Kai Schaetzl wrote:
Florin Andrei wrote on Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:42:46 -0700:
No, that's fine, really. I was just pointing out that, for some Internet-facing systems, this policy may be inadequate, due to the fast-changing nature of the Internet.
I disagree. The included Postfix works just fine. You have a very specific need that 99.??? % of the users don't have. This doesn't rectify such a major version jump. You can always install a newer version that has the features you need by yourself - as you did.
We have a mechanism in CentOS that allows for such functionality. Which is : leave the distro packages as is, and use the Plus repo for added of changed functionality that only a smaller percentage of the people might need. And I am offering to help someone work through the process of getting this package into the Plus repo.
Now the task of someone stepping up and taking on the responsibility is open.
- KB
-
Athmane Madjoudj -
Florin Andrei -
John R Pierce -
Kai Schaetzl -
Karanbir Singh -
Les Mikesell -
Paul Heinlein -
Stephen Harris -
Whit Blauvelt